Pete Evans: the prince of paleo

He has copped ridicule and criticism as Australia’s leading paleo diet evangelist. But that only makes Pete Evans more defiant.

By Lissa Christopher

11 February 2015 — 5:56pm

Pete Evans glows with a mix of good health and missionary zeal. His aim: to spread the word, and the word is "paleo".

He is lean, but not gaunt, his blue-eyed gaze intense. From certain angles, he looks more like a boy than a 41-year-old man. He, too, finds his new reflection remarkable. "I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and I see a very young teenage boy looking back at me. It's exciting because five years ago I was looking at myself, going, 'F... Pete, you are looking old!'

Pete Evans: "I don't mind a little bit of controversy because I will give it back."

Photo: James Brickwood

"I was getting a bit bloated. I was a bit lethargic ... and I was like 'oh, is this it?' It's amazing to turn the corner or actually reverse ..." He stops himself, presumably recognising that age reversal might just be a paleo claim too far.

"I don't talk about age reversal ... I talk about quality of life and that's how I can best describe [the paleo lifestyle]: the energy and the quality of life and the clarity is even better than when I was a teenager. It's f...in' bizarre."

Pete Evans cooks cauliflower fried "rice" at home.

Photo: James Brickwood

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Evans used to be the plump-of-cheek face of the Hugos hospitality group, known for its fashionable chain of gourmet pizza bars. But now, he wouldn't go near a pizza crust. He is the country's highest-profile evangelist for the paleo diet. Broadly speaking, paleo advocates eschew all grains, legumes and processed foods, including sugar, dairy and vegetable fats. The theory is that such newfangled foodstuffs are not suited to the Stone Age genetics within our 21st-century bodies.

Evans is clearly finding an audience for his message, or at least his recipes. In January, his cookbook Family Food: 130 Delicious Paleo Recipes for Every Day became the best-selling book in the country. He has a popular Facebook page, and two more books in the pipeline. He has launched an online paleo "activation" program and is this month on a 26-stop Learn to Cook The Paleo Way tour.

But he has his critics, as well as those willing to poke fun at his conversion. Evans, for his part, claims he is "immune" to the negativity. "I don't mind a little bit of the controversy," he says. "Because f..., I will give it, too."

Evans' home in Sydney's eastern beaches is large, but not flashy. There's a lot of clear space, not much furniture. A series of kaleidoscopic posters representing chakras climbs one wall. I recognise the impressive kitchen, with its white runway of a benchtop, from a rooftop advertising billboard near my home – for a time, Evans' bench and beatific smile shone down on the traffic below.

Evans' cauliflower fried "rice".

Photo: James Brickwood

Wearing shorts and T-shirt, and still sporting a layer of foundation from filming My Kitchen Rules, Evans sets himself up on the couch with a herbal tea and begins to lay out his convictions on a range of topics. He doesn't drink coffee. "It's a stimulant," he says. "If you need a stimulant in your life then something is out of balance."

Evans began his foray into the primal lifestyle about three years ago, around the time he split up with his long-term partner, Astrid Ellinger, with whom he has two daughters, Chilli, 10, and Indii, 8. He also stepped away from the Hugos Group he and his brother David founded in the mid-'90s, and took up with Nicola Robinson, now his fiancée. "I was not enjoying my life," is Evans' pithy summary of the period. He declines to say more.

His friend and My Kitchen Rules colleague Manu Feildel puts it this way: "I think Pete was surrounded by people who wanted him to be someone he didn't want to be. I don't want to go into details. I think, one day, he just had enough. He went, 'You know what, that's it. Today is the day that I'm not going to be treated that way and I'm going to change my life.' And he changed all of his life; the people he knew, the things he ate, his lifestyle, all of it. This is to clean the blackboard and start again."

Robinson also seems to have sought a clean slate. She has stepped away from her own previous life – as a New Zealand celebrity, pneumatic bikini model and wife of wealthy NZ businessman Eric Watson – and taken up a more demure, anonymous and health-focused existence by Evans' side.

"The circles I move in now are very different from my old ones and I have more fun now with my new group of friends," Evans says. Then, lowering his voice, "We talk about love. We talk about energy. We talk about food. We talk about the state of the land, the education of the children ... We don't talk about crap. It's funny because, and I'm going to get a bit deep here, once your energy is changed, you attract that energy, too, and those sorts of people."

The paleo regimen is not Evans' first radical dietary shift. He was vegan for a number of years, inspired by the US self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins, whose books, such as Awaken the Giant Within, he'd "devoured". Before then, Evans says, "I was a surfer from the Gold Coast, hair down to my shoulders, and I had never read a book in my life, except for Dr Seuss." He says he has been interested in health and alternative therapies ever since, and has studied kinesiology and massage.

The staircase to the second level of the house Evans and Robinson share is festooned with towels and swimsuits. "Nic and I are both water babies," he says. "We find the ocean is a very healing place." I don't even ask to see upstairs.

Evans had warned me, during a brief phone call the previous day, that I would find him quite self-protective. "Pete bashing has become a sort of national pastime," he said, with a laugh.

He's referring to Pete parodies on Twitter and regular drubbings from local and overseas news organisations. In 2012, in this magazine's " My Day on a Plate" column, Evans' claim that he ate "activated almonds" launched a frenzy of ridicule on social media. A group of local objectors recently launched their own Facebook page, Blocked By Pete, after Evans called a halt to the criticisms they were posting on his page.

"My Facebook page is for people who are adopting this way of life to come and feel safe with the knowledge that we share," says Evans. To the critics he says: "No, f... off. You've got your own space for your veganism and your f...in' dietitians' page. I don't come into your page and sprout my shit. We've got a community, a tribe of like-minded individuals who have a safe place to share their stories without feeling like they have to justify or be vindicated by external ..." He doesn't finish the sentence.

Over the course of the afternoon, Evans prefaces quite a few revelations and strong opinions with "this is off the record", his tanned hand hovering over my voice recorder. Occasionally, he backtracks to take earlier comments off the table. About paleo, however, he can't say enough.

Advocates of the paleo diet claim the lifestyle promotes "optimal" health and, depending which one you read, that it can also cure, ameliorate or reduce the risk of a host of ailments, from type 2 diabetes to autism, irritable bowel syndrome to Alzheimer's disease. Some of these claims have attracted scalding criticism from experts. But it is the paleo assertion that grains are not just unnecessary for humans but harmful that is perhaps most contentious.

"Are grains bad for everyone?" I ask.

"That's a fascinating question and I'm going to cop a lot of grief for this," Evans says, "but if you want to look at it from a generational or an observational viewpoint of our species, we are producing weaker and weaker offspring as the generations progress.

"Now, some people think they can eat whatever they like and it has no bearing on their health whatsoever, but have they taken into account what they are doing for the next generation?"

Evans willingly admits he's no scientist. When it comes to promoting his beliefs, he's teamed up with Nora Gedgaudas, author of Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life, and relies heavily on her knowledge. "I leave the science stuff to Nora. She's great at it. She can talk to you about the science until your eyes roll back in your head."

Gedgaudas is a US-based "nutritional therapist". The commendations on the first page of her book come from an investment adviser, a comedian/author, and Glen Zielinski, "Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurology at Carrick Institute for Graduate Studies". Carrick is a chiropractic college.

Peter Gibson, professor and director of gastroenterology at The Alfred Hospital and Monash University, is not a fan of her chapter on grains. "The quotes and data [Gedgaudas] does mention are cherry-picked. She has used multiple statements of 'facts' that have no basis in science or, where they do, they are often used out of context with misleading connotations ('pseudoscience')," he wrote, among other things, in response to my request for comment.

The British Dietetic Association has said the paleo diet could easily be an "unbalanced, time-consuming, socially isolating diet", warning that cutting out dairy could compromise bone health. "Potentially dangerous" was how the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) described it in a statement last July.

Evans is having none of it. "Show me where the danger is," he says. "Show me some evidence that this does not work. Show me all the people who are getting sick from adopting this way. You are not going to find it." He says his Facebook page has been flooded with posts from people who have found relief on the diet.

He queries why the DAA seems to think it's safe enough for coeliacs and the dairy-intolerant to cut out entire food groups "but lo and behold, if you come out and say you follow a paleo lifestyle. You can't do that! That's dangerous." He lets out a peal of laughter. "Then f...in' prove it! You prove to me that it's dangerous and I will eat my f...in' hat."

When I ask if there's a food he misses – close to tears, myself, at the thought of life without peanut butter toast or cheesecake – Evans says no. Nothing. Things like that, he says, "don't even look like real food to me any more".

Feildel recalls with fondness days gone by when Evans "used to go drinking and partying and socialising and eating out". He jokes about how the two of them would eat out together and order for 12. "Pete's diet has completely changed, so we don't do that any more. I miss him for that."

He says he respects Evans' commitment – "It takes balls to do that" – but also worries about him. "He does look good and his brain works at 100 miles an hour. He is very healthy in every way, but I do feel scared a little about it because he is going to the extreme of that diet."

There's also the publicity Evans attracts, not all of it positive. "Pete says to me 'Oh, I was in the paper again and they are having a go at me.' And I say to him, 'Pete, if you are going to be fighting a war like this, it's going to happen forever.' But listen, from what I see, [paleo] makes him happy."

Between two bouts of chat on the couch, Evans heads to the kitchen to prepare his recipe for cauliflower fried "rice" with prawns for a short video segment. In front of the camera he is in his element: confident, charming, able to speak, look to camera and dice like a fiend, all without losing a finger. Or even part of one. With all the intense talk about health and diet and the meaning of life, I had almost forgotten he is an experienced professional chef.

It is, at times, challenging to get Evans to answer direct questions. He is prone to long, digressive orations about everything from the cruelties of dairy farming to the way traditional tribal peoples revere childbirth to his belief that there should be more research into childhood vaccinations and autism. Getting him to answer "Do you drink alcohol?" takes three attempts.

"Not really, no," he says, finally.

"Put it this way, I've drunk enough for two lifetimes in my former life." Then, unprompted, after a few comments about the societal harms of alcohol, he says: "People say to me, 'Pete, everything in moderation. You are an alarmist. You're an extremist.' And I always say 'Well, I'm here to ring the f...in' bell.'

"But you have got to say how much alcohol can an alcoholic have in moderation? How much refined carbohydrates can a diabetic have in moderation? How much ill-health do you want to have in moderation? How much autoimmune disease would you like to have in moderation? How much cancer would you like to have in moderation? How much heart disease would you like in moderation? How much mental illness would you like to have in moderation? And I'm sure the answer to that would be, none."

With more success will no doubt come more criticism, but Evans says he is up for it. "I will get stick. You know, it's a bit of a game ... I see a different type of therapist every week, or every second week, to help with setting goals, to help remove limiting self-beliefs, to work on global expansion, to help with consciousness.

"I've always wanted to keep evolving and striving to not have fears, to not be intimidated by anything or anybody."

Of media criticism, he says: "It's a test. For me, it's like, 'C'mon, is that all you've got?' "